How to Print Selected Text from Any Mac Application

Are there occasions when you’d like to print just part of an email message or web page? Here’s a technique you can use to print selected text from just about any application on your Mac. I’ll use an email message in Apple’s Mail application as an example.

Open Mail and select a bit of text in an email message.

Go to the Mail menu and select Services. From the sub-menu select Make New Sticky Note. (If you’re using an application other than Mail you won’t have a Mail menu. Instead, go to the menu named after your application. For example, if you’re using Firefox, select the text and go to the Firefox menu.)

The application named Stickies will open and you’ll see a new sticky note on your screen that contains the text you selected in your email message.

Go to the File menu and select Print.

Click the Print button to print that sticky note.

That’s it! (You can delete the sticky note by clicking the small square in its upper left corner.)

You can use this same technique in Safari, Firefox, Word 2011 and most other Mac OS X applications. This technique will not work in some older Mac applications such as Word 2004 and Quicken 2005.